Dell To Offer Fee-based Support Service To Customers

[rkr1958]

reference

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell said Monday it will offer a new fee-based service for customers with issues with their in-warranty Dell-branded products. "Dell's new premium support service is to provide a dedicated team of technical professionals who customers can contact directly for support of any Dell-branded product," said the company in a statement. The service will offer advanced support team in North America for one year. The company is also planning to offer new services for customers who buy Dell products at retail locations.

Copyright © 2008 MarketWatch, Inc.

There goes Dell support! Fee-based service for IN-WARRANTY products!

[TBoneit]

Nowhere did the quote infer or say that free support was going away. If you are the impatient type then it is a offering for you to get speedy help from someone that isn't just reading from a computer screen.

Typical Dialog:
My computer doesn't turn on.
CSR type, type, type, read "Does the power light come on?"
Yes
and so on. My gripe with any tech support is that even if I have isolated the problem. They still want me to repeat things I've done, so I end up getting very PO'd.

My suspicion is that if I called up a computer maker for warranty, And said I need to do a RMA because a ball of fire shot out the back followed by a cloud of smoke they would want me to go through their troubleshooting process.

[disturbed1]

reference

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell said Monday it will offer a new fee-based service for customers with issues with their in-warranty Dell-branded products. "Dell's new premium support service is to provide a dedicated team of technical professionals who customers can contact directly for support of any Dell-branded product," said the company in a statement. The service will offer advanced support team in North America for one year. The company is also planning to offer new services for customers who buy Dell products at retail locations.

Copyright © 2008 MarketWatch, Inc.

There goes Dell support! Fee-based service for IN-WARRANTY products!

That's SOFTWARE support.

Dell doesn't have to support anything but their hardware, which is what is under warranty

[rkr1958]

reference

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell said Monday it will offer a new fee-based service for customers with issues with their in-warranty Dell-branded products. "Dell's new premium support service is to provide a dedicated team of technical professionals who customers can contact directly for support of any Dell-branded product," said the company in a statement. The service will offer advanced support team in North America for one year. The company is also planning to offer new services for customers who buy Dell products at retail locations.

Copyright © 2008 MarketWatch, Inc.

There goes Dell support! Fee-based service for IN-WARRANTY products!

That's SOFTWARE support.

Dell doesn't have to support anything but their hardware, which is what is under warranty

OK - maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the word software anywhere in the article I quoted. Am I overlooking it? I do see, "Dell-branded products." Does that imply software?

[disturbed1]

Dell has, and always will support it's hardware. Meaning if your hardrive fails, you call them, and they'll replace it. Dell is a hardware vendor. What Dell never has done is support the software. Meaning if you call and say - Hey my screen saver locks up the PC, Dell would simply offer to walk you through a restore, or refer you to Microsoft. Now Dell will say "Hey for $49.95 we'll fix that problem".

For their other products, not 100% of the features are supported with Customer service after 30 days. Meaning after a year, if you called Dell with questions about how to listen to MP3s on your hand held, depending on the CSU you spoke with, they would either refer you to the website, user manual, explain that usage isn't covered, or hold your hand. The hand holding is not part of their standard after 30 days.

This is nothing new or out of the ordinary. Hardware vendors (Dell, HP, Compaq, Sony...) all only offer free support for their hardware, they don't support 3rd party software.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~section=010

The article you linked and quoted isn't the full article.
http://www.centredaily.com/business/technology/story/538367.html

[MJA]

is this so called "advanced support team in North America" is going to be based in India or the US ?

[dadrab]

I recently went a few rounds with Dell on an old system I have that would not accept a clean reformat. All it would do is install the new OS along side the ones that were already there. I COULD NOT get that damn system to do a clean install no matter what I tried. So I called Dell.

They were actually very nice about it all, especially since the system I was calling about is a premium vintage 2000 model.

The long and short of it all was that, through about half a dozen phone calls, I talked to folks in the US and India. One of the US guys I talked to, of course, tried to sell me the premium support package and assured me that future service under that program would be from US based techs. I rather liked that notion in that I could easily understand him. The techs from India, while annoying with the silly questions, were very nice and helpful as long as I could decipher what the Hell they were saying.

Interestingly enough though, it was one of the Indian techs that finally conviced me that my issue was not curable - and was a condition of motherboard incompatability. I'm sure she did so in the hopes of flipping me to a sales associate.

Her ploy only kind of work. I did get a new system - after a quick trip to the local computer parts distributor and building one myself.

The old system still works fine, but with 16 GB worth of operating systems on it.

[JohnnyMalaria]

is this so called "advanced support team in North America" is going to be based in India or the US ?

It's advanced because it will be in timezone many hours ahead.

[TBoneit]

Did you try zeroing the drive using the makers utilities?

That would have been my first step after the windows reformat didn't work. Both Seagate (Maxtor) and Western Digital have utilities available on their websites that will both test and zero out the drive. ON the WD a quick zero will zero out the start and end of the drive and as far as a windows install is concerned the drive is like new partitionwise. Likewise for the Seagate utility. It has a timed zero function so you could choose 30 or 60 seconds and the start of the drive would be zero'd.

I'd that just in case you had some Malware that did something funny to the drive.

[dadrab]

I didn't try that. Maybe I should try revisiting the problem.

Another issue that I had at the time was that the old system wouldn't boot from a CD. I was able to make a set of floppies to boot from and, at one point, I thought I was golden, but fate stepped in and the set-up stopped and would not continue claiming I was missing a critcial file.

I really just think that old system's running some hardware that caused some compatability issues.

I ended up putting an additional 200 gig drive in the box, left the original one in there and gave it to one of my sons to use as his homework/music storage unit. It still works just fine for that and I don't have to piss away anymore time with it.

Your suggestion may spur me to rethink though. Thanks much.

[TBoneit]

I have seen setup stop and complain about a missing file due to bad memory too. Nowdays when I see that happen I pull out the old memory test CD.